"To express the original brand concept of “becoming beautiful through movement”, we chose the theme “rock-climbing on Omotesando” and developed a design that uses the mismatch between a rugged outdoor sport and Tokyo’s fashion district to its advantage. Instead of the usual rough and outdoorsy climbing wall, we came up with the idea of using interior design elements like picture frames, mirrors, deer heads, bird cages and flower vases to create a challenging wall with hard-to-find holds and unusual finger grips. We hope that our uniquely Omotesando-style climbing wall inspires newcomers to try out the sport, and starts a new wave in fitness with style." - Yanko Design

Sunday, September 23, 2007

"Muji is nonbrand, but also nonfunction. No added function," says Fukasawa. To explain, he draws a typical cutting board. It has a shallow gutter along the edge to collect water and a handle on one side. "There are many functions here," he says.

"But a Japanese cutting board is just wood." He draws a simple block.

"Of course, the first one is very functional … from one point of view. But the handle makes the cutting board harder to clean," says Fukasawa. "It's really a plus and a minus—an added function, but also a marketing tool. So, in a sense, the plain wood one is perfect without any additional function and is more truthful, more honest. But this idea is very difficult to promote."

Monday, September 03, 2007

water presure is amazing. Bathtub is amazing. very Zen & spa worthy. ginger bath friendly. well versed in epsom salt. great to hang bathing suits in. in need of dirty magazines.

currently in the process of greenhousing the area to death. Current plants includes tons without names. Environmental and air friendly. ISO native plants, not doing a very good job. Just received a treatment of water and simple green and cobweb removal. wondeeful.

Note: There is also a huge something gallon (my wingspan + and knee deep) fishtank that has sturdy goldfish that are large and hypnotizing. Just cleaned by its a sickness. worthy of love. do not pet.

Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the origin of our ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful, is apparently, a classic. Therefore, it is available online for free (there is no such thing as a free lunch? pfft!).

On Beauty, he writes:

"I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in many cases, this was designed, I am unable to discover; for I see no greater reason for a connection between man and several animals who are attired in so engaging a manner, than between him and some others who entirely want this attraction, or possess it in a far weaker degree. But it is probable that Providence did not make even this distinction, but with a view to some great end; though we cannot perceive distinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom, nor our ways his ways."

Burke's writing is stunningly simple (read-- easy to understand). Here is his belief on tragedy:"Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favorite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy."

Burke writes that "it is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures."

There are some deviations, of course, but these deviations are unique to that individual and often times, the individual knows that his notion of taste or beauty is different from that of society's. "The pleasure of all the senses, of the sight, and even of the taste, that most ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and low, learned and unlearned."

George P. Landow is a history professor at Brown University. He synthesizes the work of a few people (including Burke) in his article, Ruskin's theory of Typical Beauty. It's boring as hell.

“Beauty is mostly in sight, but it is to be found too in things we hear, in combination of words and also in music, and in all music [not only in songs]; for tunes and rhythms are certainly beautiful: and for those who are advancing upwards from sense-perception ways of life and actions and characters and intellectual activities are beautiful, and there is the beauty of virtue. If there is any beauty prior to this, this discussion will reveal it.

On this theory nothing single and simple but only a composite thing will have any beauty. It will be the whole which is beautiful, and the parts will not have the property of beauty by themselves, but will contribute to the beauty of the whole. But if the whole is beautiful the parts must be beautiful too; a beautiful whole can certainly not be composed of ugly parts; all the parts must have beauty.

You must become first all godlike and all beautiful if you intend to see God and beauty. First the soul will come in its ascent to intellect and there will know the Forms, all beautiful, and will affirm that this, the Ideas, are beauty; for all things are beautiful by this, by the products and essence of intellect. That which is beyond this we call the nature of the Good, which holds beauty as a screen before it.

So in a loose and general way of speaking the Good is the primary beauty; but if one distinguishes the intelligibles [from the Good] one will say that the place of the Forms is the intelligible beauty, but the Good is That which is beyond, the ‘spring and origin’ of beauty; or one will place the Good and the primal beauty on the same level: in any case, however, beauty is in the intelligible world."

"Plotinus recognizes a hierarchy of beauty. But what all types of beauty have in common is that they consist in form or images of the Forms eternally present in Intellect. The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty where the splendor of the paradigm is of necessity most occluded. If the beauty of a body is inseparable from that body, then it is only a remote image of the non-bodily Forms. Still, our ability to experience such beauty serves as another indication of our own intellects' undescended character. We respond to physical beauty because we dimly recognize its paradigm. To call this paradigm ‘the Form of Beauty’ would be somewhat misleading unless it were understood to include all the Forms cognized by Intellect. Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus traces a hierarchy of beautiful objects above the physical, culminating in the Forms themselves. And their source, the Good, is also the source of their beauty. The beauty of the Good consists in the virtual unity of all the Forms. As it is the ultimate cause of the complexity of intelligible reality, it is the cause of the delight we experience in form."